


so they say

by newsbypostcard



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Loyalty, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 03:31:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6687421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke says, "I guess awe works. A little reverence wouldn't hurt, though."</p><p>Varric does not laugh, despite the thrill in his lungs. For this, he has definitely earned his ale for the day.</p><p>(Or: these are the ways Varric tries to reconcile his affection for Hawke. Or his... friendship... with her...? Whatever the case may be.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	so they say

**Author's Note:**

> Unrequited love fic, sorry, I am sorry. Background Hawke/Isabela and Varric/Bianca. It's not as bad as it seems, I don't think. Maybe two skull emojis out of a possible five.
> 
> I tried to do something here and I'm on the fence about whether I succeeded, but it wasn't going to be written any differently! Failure is good for us, if that's what this is.

  


  


  


When the Witch of the Wilds told Hawke that the world would shake before her, Hawke's first response was to narrow her eyes.

This is the first memory Varric has of Hawke that he returns to again and again, as though _this_ was the moment he'd actually met her. He hadn't ever been sure why she'd decided to join the Deep Roads expedition, so maybe it was that this was the first time he felt like he understood her. 

(She'd never cared about coin or fame or glory, after all, but still she'd accepted his offer; let him tag along. Why? Why bother -- with him, with Bartrand, with any of it?)

The Witch had said the world would shake before her.

He'd asked her later if she knew what that meant, but they hadn't known each other yet, so she'd only shrugged and said she had no idea. In hindsight, Varric knows it was a lie. She'd known -- as he had -- that a person doesn't usually get saved by a dragon-witch unless she's being set up for something.

He wonders if it had been a self-fulfilling promise for Hawke as much as it had been for him. But some questions were never meant to be answered, in the end.

  


  


  


"That's how legends get started," Varric said to her, the first time she told him how they got out of Lothering.

She'd only lost half of her family then, so she'd still had a smile, if a sad one. "Getting saved by dragons? Or escaping narrow death by darkspawn?"

"All of the above," Varric told her. "You sure the Witch didn't mean the world was already shaking? Sounds like providence to me."

Hawke blinked at him, opened her mouth -- and _laughed_ , a warm sound that made Varric feel alive.

It had been laughable, once, to think that the world would shake before her. He could see why it had been. But it wouldn't be long at all before Varric would give anything he had to make it still for her instead, just for a while, so it doesn't feel that funny anymore.

  


  


  


It's snuck up on him, in one sense. In another -- hasn't he been pocketing any and all indications that he might've had these feelings for a while? 

Varric guesses it'll be harder to convince himself of the lie than it will be to convince others -- not that he'll ever tell a soul how he feels, of course. He's not _crazy._

Something happens to him in the Deep Roads, apart from the deep and impenetrable sense of betrayal that his brother would turn on him for gold, of course. Varric's always been a friend of gold, no denying that; but he'd never stoop _this_ far.

And isn't that -- it? Aren't they the same thing? The way he'd started to feel calmer when Hawke was around -- wasn't it just the same as the feeling he got when he thought too hard about Bartrand while sober?

The courage to be better. The courage to _do_ better.

It's not beyond him that the joint inspiration for his becoming a better dwarf is his sellout of a brother and the only other person on the continent he's ever willingly followed. It's possible there's still a bit of little-brother complex going on that he hasn't quite divested himself of yet, but it's also possible his problem is… different than that.

He pockets the thought away the second he thinks it, the way he's pocketed so many of them away over the past years, and returns in silence to his ale.

  


  


  


He doesn't know the first thing about the Fade, but he knows enough to get that it's where demons come from. That should have been enough to keep him, but he is nothing if not stubborn. If years of pining for Bianca had taught him anything, it's about his damnable stubbornness. He should have listened. He should have paid attention.

Later, he will lie to Cassandra about what he said to Hawke before they were taken in. He will tell her that he said it would be interesting. That he was intrigued.

Instead, he thinks of how Hawke had once fought a dragon and a rock wraith and countless other maddening things just to get him out safe from the Deep Roads, even after his own brother tried to seal her death.

In real life, Hawke says to him -- "I'm sorry to ask, but I could really use someone in there who wouldn't sell me out for anything," and Varric says, "That's what I'm here for, Hawke. You know you can count on me."

Then he turns on her in seconds flat, just to get back at his brother.

He apologizes, later. She accepts it; makes a joke of it, as though it wasn't the least funny thing that possibly could've happened. 

Varric is relieved. Varric laughs. Varric weeps openly once she leaves.

He swears, then and there, that he'll give anything never to have her look at him like she had in the Fade again.

  


  


  


"Where would I be without my trusty dwarf?" she greets him, arms wide and welcoming, as though all distrust between had never transpired in the first place.

Varric laughs; Varric aches. Varric lies awake, thinking of ways to make it up to her.

He manages it eventually, anyway, just by being there. He'd never thought that would've been enough of an offer, but against all odds, it is.

  


  


  


He overhears Isabela starting to decline invitations into the beds of others -- not just some, but _all_ of them. It doesn't take him long to figure out why.

He leaves town for a while; meets Bianca in a little inn in the country, halfway between Kirkwall and Tantervale. He spends a weekend basking in her, in what they used to have together; breathes her in; remembers what it's like to love freely, or illegally, or whatever way it is when it would get you killed if anyone caught you.

It's a reprieve, anyway. Of sorts. Whatever. He doesn't overthink it.

When he comes back, Hawke is waiting for him in his room, one leg bent under her chair, her toe poised on the dusty floor. 

" _There_ you are," she says, smiling. One of her hands is grasped loosely around a tankard of ale set in the middle of the table. She is at ease where he lives. "Take off for days at a time without telling anyone you were leaving? I thought the Coterie were cruel and unusual. I was beginning to worry."

"About me?" says Varric. He sets his sack hard down in the middle of the floor and tries to subdue his smile as he makes his way toward her. "What trouble could I possibly have gotten into without you?"

He sits down across from her at the table and catches the tankard of ale without a second thought when she slides it across the table toward him. 

"You say that," says Hawke, "but I've been thinking about how easy my life was before you barged your way into it. Seems all too possible that trouble attracts you instead of me. Could you imagine if I get all of this flak, only for it to turn out that it's all meant for you?"

The shock of her words must be obvious on his face, because Hawke's face drains, too.

"I didn't mean it like that, Varric." It's the way she turns on a dime between mocking and sincere that sets him on his toes. "You know I don't regret a bit of it, don't you?"

He holds her eye for longer than he should, feeling the toil in his gut grow stronger, denser, until he remembers how to force the twitch of a smile into his lips.

"That makes two of us," he tells her, and he slides the ale back across the table toward her, finding his smile suddenly genuine when she catches it with an easy smirk.

  


  


  


But the way she turns _him_ on a dime between mocking and sincere… 

Forget his toes. That sets him flat on his ass.

  


  


  


He learns to categorize her smiles, once they start to get fewer and further between. There's the way sarcasm pulls at her lips -- the way her mouth cocks up only on one side to hide her abiding skepticism of the world. There's the ghost of a smile she gives Merrill when she starts tripping over herself, kindly and encouraging. There's the way Hawke licks her lips when she catches a glimpse of Isabela across the Hanged Man, only to worry at her lip with her teeth every time her eyes flick back over to her. There's the amused glances she shares with Bethany, as though the other can read her mind just by the look on her face.

But only when it comes to Varric does she actually seem... _happy_. Either that, or he's convinced himself that she smiles differently with him just because she happens to be looking at him at the time.

He tells a joke once that leaves her in hysterics, leaning back in her chair and with her hands clutching at her stomach. One leg curls into her gut; her nose scrunches _beautifully_ on her face. Varric grins back at her, then finds his gaze has torn away, focusing on the other side of the room at some drunkard singing the Kirkwall anthem. His grin recedes to a smile, and he only listens, only listens, as though mentally recording the sound of Hawke's laugh, his eyes closing against his will.

  


  


  


Later that night, Varric goes to his room and puts quill to parchment, trying to record what he felt in case he… needs it someday. Or something. 

No words come to him; the ink blots on the empty page.

He gives it a solid ten minutes of staring, of his heart pounding away in his chest, before he trades the sheet out for Chapter 8 of _Hard in Hightown_. He writes a few hundred words; then he pulls the empty page back toward him, determined to try again.

He sets the quill on the same spot on the page. More ink bleeds through.

 _Laughter,_ he writes at last, just below the ink blot, as though acknowledging it as the beginning of the piece; but then he stares at the word, trying to figure out what comes next, only to find out that that's all he knows how to write.

  


  


  


He repeats it to himself again and again -- as he's picking up his laundry, as he's polishing his crossbow, as he's sorting through his correspondence. _Friendship._ The word becomes a mantra, as though he needs to convince himself of it. _Friendship. **Friend** ship._

He's had friends before. At least, he thinks he has. Bartrand. Bianca. ...Worthy?

He's _totally_ had friends before.

Regardless of whether he has or he hasn't, he's never felt his chest fill the way it does when he's with Hawke. You'd think, to be in his head, to feel his blood pump harder around her, that to follow her around Kirkwall made him excited just to be alive. 

And it -- _is_ possible friendship is like this. It's possible that, when you see any friend unexpectedly across the square, your heart threatens to beat out of your chest. It seems possible that that is normal and that it happens to many people.

Anything's _possible_ , after all.

  


  


  


Varric has always been good with telling convincing lies. So -- particularly about Hawke -- he starts telling more of them. 

In fact, he makes as much shit up as he possibly can. If he's doomed himself to being the kind of man who can only talk about the woman of his heart -- _despite_ undertaking drastic measures to prevent himself from saying a word -- he'd sure as shit better avoid telling the truth while he's at it.

It seems weird to be telling stories about Hawke without her knowing that he's doing it, so he resolves to tell her, with his fists balled anxiously as he does it. 

"Don't the stories mention my stunning good looks?" Hawke says in reply, surprisingly accepting of the news that he talks about her nonstop. "What about my cunning wit?"

"Nope!" he says, relieved that he has in fact refrained from the former. "They skip right to the part about the dwarf with a gorgeous crossbow and the heart of gold. I try to steer them straight, but you know how stories go. Just... don't be surprised if people seem in awe."

She doesn't tell him to stop. That's a relief, because he's pretty sure he couldn't if he tried. She does ask him why he tells the stories, though, and he says -- "Honestly, I don't know. It's just something I do." He says, "There's a recipe to a good hero, Hawke. It's like alchemy." And he hopes to Andraste that she doesn't test him on how he really sees her in amidst all these tall tales, because at this rate he really might say it all out loud.

Hawke says, "I guess awe works. A little reverence wouldn't hurt, though."

Varric does not laugh, despite the thrill in his lungs. For this, he has definitely earned his ale for the day.

"You're beautiful, deadly, and hang out with fantastic dwarves," he tells her, keeping a hand on the reins of his self-restraint. "It would be a crime if people didn't talk about you." 

If the conversation teaches him anything, it's that exaggerations don't cover up feelings after all -- in fact they may do the opposite, they may amplify them to fill the room, and he may be revealing his hand again and again to her, only to have her take it all from him willingly.

  


  


  


The stories filter out, through the years. When the Seeker comes, it is because she has based her beliefs about Hawke on a thousand untruths. 

If it's Varric who brings the Seeker after them, it's up to Varric, he reasons, to fix it.

  


  


  


He finds her standing in the middle of the Hanged Man, after her mother dies.

She just stands there, hands loose at her sides, staring at the same spot on the floor. Varric knows that look. He hates that she feels it. He wants to take on that burden, to carry this grief so that she doesn't have to. For all that she bears -- for all she never asked for -- she doesn't need this on top of it.

"Hawke," he says quietly, moving towards her. It might be the first time he's said her name when it hasn't sounded like a goad.

Hawke blinks up at him, her eyes focusing only slowly. She looks surprised to find him there. "Varric," she says, smiling something uncategorizable. "I didn't see you there."

"Can I get you anything? You wanna sit down?"

"I was looking for Isabela," she says emptily.

Varric's heart sinks. He tries to get over himself, but that's obviously never been his strong suit. "She's not here," he tells her, a hand on his chest.

"Oh." Hawke looks at her feet, as though ashamed to be caught seeking out comfort. "Do you know where she is?"

"I don't." He does. Terrified by the possibility that Hawke might actually _need_ her, Isabela had returned to the Hanged Man long enough to down four shots in quick succession, and then had walked briskly out again. He doesn't expect to see her for a couple days, given what she'd been muttering under her breath about the constraints of commitment. He isn't about to tell Hawke that now.

He puts a hand hesitantly on her arm, trying not to overthink how to initiate contact with her. "You, uh… you wanna have a drink with me instead? We don't have to talk, or you can tell me about your mom, or, you know. Whatever you want. It just…" He shifts; averts his gaze. "It seems like maybe you shouldn't be alone right now."

And, slowly, emptily, Hawke nods, her gaze still fixed somewhere to the side. "All right. Yes. That sounds… good." When she smiles at him, some broken and pithy thing, does his heart actually shatter? "Thank you, Varric."

Varric says, "Anything you need, Hawke" -- and Maker help him, he means it with every ounce of his being.

  


  


  


In the version he tells Cassandra, Varric doesn't include the parts that matter. He tells her about the fun conversations, the jesty ones, the ones where she is mocking and he is mocking, because what is life if not a joke? He tells her about how he came to construct the image of the Champion, because for all the good lies have done him it's finally time to tell _some_ truths. But he does not tell her all of it.

He does not tell her about all the times over the years that he and Hawke sat together and just talked. He does not tell her how often they abandoned jokes for sobriety. It is the defining point of their friendship, this balance between hilarity and solemnity; yet he doesn't once bring it up. He won't, or he can't. Or both. Or neither.

It is that -- the intimate moments aren't a story to be told. Not even to the Seeker. They still wouldn't be, even if he knew the words.

They were -- close. They were close. His first friend had been his best friend, and then some, if only to him.

So he explains everything else. He tells Cassandra everything else there is to know. But even as he explains how he painted her up, Varric never quite gets around to explaining the way Hawke really is.

Wasn't the point of giving himself up, after all, to make Hawke the secret he'd keep to the grave?

  


  


  


"Can I ask you something?" she says, once, seated across from him at the table in his room. They've been talking for hours -- at least, if sitting in companionable silence counts as talking. She's been subdued all night, and you know what? That's fine with him. He may be a talker, but he'll sit with her for as long as it takes if she needs it.

"Shoot," he says, and doesn't add, _Anything._

"Ah." She clears her throat; takes on that mocking tone again. "I'm sorry, let me rephrase. Can I ask you something with the understanding that you won't then turn around and tell everyone else in this bar?"

"Hawke, please. You wound me!" Can she tell, on the rare occasion when he tells the truth? "No, but seriously. Don't you know by now that anything you tell me will wind up a garbled and extravagant version of itself at best? If you don't trust that I can keep a secret, at least trust that I can drown one in bullshit."

Her smile is pinched; it fades quickly. "It's not about me, that's all. I'm not sure… who else to talk to."

That about-face into sincerity again. Varric swallows and lifts his ale to his lips. "You can trust me, Hawke," he says, dropping his gaze to the table as he says it.

She blinks at him. She believes him. And then she takes his word for it when he tells her to keep trusting Anders.

  


  


  


After Knight-Commander Meredith, they leave together -- Hawke, Varric, Isabela, Bethany.

Three rogues and an escaped Circle mage don't exactly make for an ideal squad, but at least they have stealth on their side. Aveline and Sebastian make sure they get out of the city unimpeded; Fenris accompanies them at least until the city walls are blips in the distance; Merrill and Anders have gone before Hawke could even check on their whereabouts, off to Maker knows where, to spread their chaos elsewhere, finally letting Hawke free of them.

They've barely passed the Wounded Coast when they hear the Seeker's voice -- sending out a search party, promising not to stop looking until they've been found. The sound of the footfalls of two dozen men follow; they barely get behind a bush before they are set upon by scrutinizing eyes.

They throw down their packs; Isabela's daggers are already out, Bethany reaching back for her staff. Varric crouches in front of them, preparing to pin the first person who sees them to a tree if necessary.

"What are we going to do?" he hears Bethany whisper. Varric looks behind him at Hawke, only to see her face etched with worry.

"I'm not sure," she admits after a moment.

Fortunately, Varric is.

"They're not going to let up without finding us," he tells them. "Not unless they have a distraction."

"What do you have in mind?" Hawke asks.

Bethany looks between them. "I could cast a fireball, or--"

Varric shakes his head. "That won't do much but let them know where we are. They'll need a reason to stop the search, not to focus it." He takes a breath. "Let me surrender. You three can sneak off while they're figuring out what to do with me."

Hawke frowns. "What? Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not," he says gravely. "Unless you've got any better ideas, it's the only way."

In the silence that follows, Hawke only stares at him.

Isabela, however, is staring at Hawke. "He has a point," she mutters.

" _No,_ " Hawke bites out immediately.

"We haven't got another option. Unless you want to get captured…"

"We all get out, or none of us do."

But as Bethany meets Varric's eye and then cuts her gaze away again, he knows that he's got two of the only other people in the world Hawke would listen to on his side. 

So it's decided. It's over.

"They're looking for you, Hawke, but they'll take me. You, Isabela, Bethany--"

"Varric, it's not a discussion."

"--can get away, get clear. By the time I've convinced them that I don't know anything--"

"But you do know something," Bethany says. "It _is_ a risk."

"We didn't know where we were going when we left Kirkwall, and we still don't. That's what I'll tell them." He looks nervously behind him. "We don't have time to discuss it. I'm going. It's been great, I mean it, all of you. Now get the hell out of here, and don't look back."

"Varric, _stop this_ ," Hawke hisses after him, holding him back with a fist in his coat; but with a wink at Bethany and 'take care of her' muttered sidelong to Isabela, Varric throws a stealthing flask and is gone, leaving Hawke grasping at Bianca in his stead.

  


  


  


Ways in which he has failed her:

It was his lies about Hawke, and never Hawke herself, that had made the world shake. The Tales of the Champion proved so grandiose that it had even convinced a Seeker to believe she could ever tear the world asunder. Varric was good. Varric was too good. Varric was so good that it doomed them all.

It was the truth he had felt in his heart, the lie he had told himself that she would never befriend anyone who could cause the destruction to come, that had led them here. As though she was too good to be deceived. As though he himself had not been deceived by his own trickster brother.

It was his stories -- the ones he told the world; the ones he told himself -- that forced her back precisely where she began. Now she was homeless; mourning; fleeing; shunned.

All that is left is to try to make it right again. No matter what it takes.

  


  


  


Varric looks up as he's being placed in handcuffs -- the Seeker towering over him, a dozen blades and bows held at his position -- to see Hawke in the far distance. She decloaks suddenly from stealth, her hand laced with Bethany's, Bianca strapped to her back -- and meets his eye.

It's a risk; Varric knows it is. But he holds her gaze, in case to still tell her that he's glad to take the hit.

He wonders -- as Hawke is pulled into the cover of the trees; as the Seeker manhandles Varric into a caravan -- if he'll ever see her again. 

In a sense, he hopes to Andraste he never does.

  


  


  


He finds it in the middle of some old financial documents, several years later.

Varric stares at the parchment a long damn time, as though fixing him in place. His cursive is looser now than it was then, as though he has grown wearier of writing in the years since he wrote the word. 

_Laughter._ Nothing more is written, but for an ink blot besmirching the top of the page.

He remembers the way she'd curled up into herself on that day with crystalline clarity -- the way her head had thrown back, her hands at her stomach, and the rise of her knee, as though hilarity had traveled through her bodily and set her afire. He remembers the way the sound had come breathy and reluctant, the joke catching her offguard; and he remembers the tavern chatter in the background, the way the sound of her had handily overridden it, the way the drunkard in the corner had been singing the same verse again and again for over an hour.

Forcing himself into the present, he reaches for a quill and adds in the bottom corner of the page, in some approximation of the tighter cursive of his youth:

_Hawke._

It is, after all, the only word actually about _Hawke_ \-- the woman, not the Champion -- that he has ever actually written. 

Now, he resolves, it can be the only word about Hawke he ever needs to write.

Varric places the page down again; gives it a pile all for itself. And without another glance at it, he returns to sorting through his files, trying to ignore the spark within him.

  


  


  



End file.
